Mojave Desert Sanctuary

by Gary J George

  Chapter 14

  Smoke Tree, California

  And the Mountains

  Of the Eastern Mojave Desert

  Fourth Week of June, 1961

  Aeden Snow

  In Smoke Tree, the constant, blustery, cold north winds of February and March are irritating to the point of madness. They howl and moan all day and all night for weeks on end, taking the humidity to near zero, cracking lips, making noses bleed, shaking houses and rattling windows and doors. The sand driven before the unending winds pits car windshields, scars paint jobs and leaves piles of grit on windowsills, no matter how securely windows are closed.

  But the harsh winds of winter give way to mild breezes out of the west in April and May. Those are wonderful months in Smoke Tree. Because the humidity stays low, days in the nineties and even one hundreds are pleasant, and the lows dip into the seventies at night.

  Most years, the good weather lasts through the first two weeks of June, but in 1961, we were blessed with one extra week. But just when we had been lulled into the false hope of a mild summer, the terrible heat of the Mojave came down on us like a hammer.

  On the very day of the solstice, the sun rose like the baleful, angry, blood-red eye of a dragon over the Black Mountains. By ten o’clock, it was already a hundred and ten under a cloudless sky. By noon, it was clear any hope of overnight cooling was gone and would not return until early October.

  When I got in my car to drive downtown for lunch, I had to wrap a rag around the steering wheel to keep from burning my hands. Rolling the windows all the way down was no help either. The inside of the car was still like an oven. The hot air swirled around me and sucked the moisture out of my skin as I drove to Renée’s drive-in for lunch.

  I got my five burgers for a dollar and carried them to an empty table beneath the overhang. The thermometer wired to the pole next to where I sat read one hundred and fifteen degrees. As I ate, I watched the traffic streaming by on 66. None of the older cars had air conditioning. I saw lots of red, irritated faces. Most of the tourists who had just dropped down the hill from Kingman, Arizona had no idea what lay ahead of them on their way to the coast. Those who had made it across the Mojave and were headed east still had the drive from Topock through Yucca and Kingman before they could leave the worst of the heat behind. Sixty more miles of steady climbing that could destroy radiators, rupture hoses, overwhelm water pumps and vapor lock carburetors.

  The previous summer, when I worked at the ’76, I tried to keep an eye out for cars with young children as they pulled into the station. Unsuspecting parents sometimes let kids get out of the car barefoot to dash to the restrooms, unaware the temperature on the blacktop could approach one hundred and eighty degrees. If I was too late to warn them, I tried to scoop up the closest kids, their faces already contorted with the first shock of the horrible heat blistering their feet.

  Heat. Mojave heat. Dangerous, relentless, brutal heat. It felt like the flaming hydrogen plasma blasting off the surface of the sun had hurtled through space with the specific intent of blistering Smoke Tree from sunup to sundown. Over a hundred and twenty some days. Always over a hundred at midnight. Dropping into the low nineties just before dawn. And then the blazing fireball would lift above the horizon and start the assault again. On the twenty third of June, the temperature reached one hundred and twenty degrees for the first time in the year. It would hover in the vicinity for the rest of the summer.

  The low desert heat took a toll on the hardiest plants. The white bursage looked dead because it gave up its tiny leaves to conserve moisture. Even matchweed, skeletonweed, and scorpionweed, all tough plants, drooped in the heat. Only the resilient creosote, with its extensive root system, was capable of staying green for months without rain.

  Not only shrubs, but even large cactus could not survive the summer heat of the low desert. The reddish-pink barrel cactus, staghorn cholla, teddy bear cholla and Mojave mound cactus did not grow around Smoke Tree. Instead, they kept to the hillsides at higher elevations. Only the very small, ground-hugging types clung to life in the sparse shade beneath the creosote.

  Work was a challenge. Mr. Halverson pretty much kept to the hardware store, leaving Will Bailey and me to custom cut lumber as required and load the varieties of building supplies onto the truck. I made the deliveries while Will stayed back at the yard to deal with other orders that came in.

  When I drove the delivery truck through residential neighborhoods, it was rare to see anyone outside. Dogs and cats stayed shaded up next to trees and under porches. No birds flew or called. Children stayed indoors, with the exception of those lucky enough to get dropped off at the high school swimming pool, the only pool in Smoke Tree, to spend the entire day in a cloud of chlorine for twenty five cents. Life seemed to hold its breath, waiting to see if this would be the day the world finally burst into flame.

  Two sounds predominated in the otherwise deserted neighborhoods. First was the constant murmur of swamp coolers. The second was the shrill, insane trilling of thousands upon thousands of Apache cicadas. They were loudest in the hottest parts of the day, as if the sun had driven them mad. They were everywhere in town and in the river bottom. Hundreds on every tree and shrub. Easily alarmed, clouds of them flew when disturbed, squirting out the liquid they had sucked from plants and trees as they went.

  At around four o’clock, when the sun finally angled to the west, the temperature would drop below a hundred and ten. Little League teams would show up to practice at the town’s two ball fields. Children would re-appear in the neighborhoods. Birds emerged from the trees and sat on telephone wires. But the dogs stayed under the porches until after sundown.

  By the end of my work day, I was always wiped out. The gallons of water I drank and sweated out seemed to leach all the energy from me. All I wanted to do was get to the Colorado River. From lunch on I dreamed about its cool waters.

  The river ran along the east edge of Smoke Tree, but it was not easy to get to without a car. And it was not a place parents let younger children visit on their own. Because of the strong current, it was as dangerous as it was appealing. But the few teenagers who owned cars went there as often as they could during the heat of the day and even lingered into the night.

  As soon as we closed, I would drive to Sunset Beach. Taking off nothing but my boots and socks, I would walk to the northernmost end of the boat dock and dive in.

  Instant bliss! Even on the hottest days, the temperature of the river never rose above fifty five degrees. In the terrible heat, the water felt frigid. I would let the strong current carry me swiftly to the south end of the dock where a rope tied to a cleat stretched out in the water. I would hang from it, letting the cold water flow over me as I twisted and turned and ducked under the surface, letting the river pull the heat from my body.

  When I felt like all the sawdust, cement, gypsum, sand and sweat had washed off me, I would climb onto the dock. Stretching out on the planks, I would be completely dry within fifteen minutes. Sometimes, before I left, I would stop by the Sunset Beach snack shop to visit with my former girlfriend, Linda Bergstrom. Although we didn’t date anymore, we were still friends. She was working over the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. Linda was the only person I knew who was in college. I had lots of questions for her.

  I never had much appetite after a day in the sun, so I usually put off eating anything until after my evening run. My track season had come to an end after the C.I.F. individual quarterfinals in May, and I took a break from training. But because I was due to report for freshman football practice at Cambria College in the middle of August, I knew I had to start running again to get back in shape

  As I pounded through the streets of Smoke Tree not long after sundown, there were very few people outside. Occasionally, I saw an adult watering a lawn, or some kids playing tag or hide and seek, but mostly I saw the flickering blue lights of televisions and heard music and canned laughter. The sounds came all
the way to the street because windows were left open so swamp coolers could do their job.

  Three years earlier, if I had run through the same neighborhoods, I would have seen people outside visiting in the twilight. Three years before, there had been no television in Smoke Tree. Because of the town’s isolation, television had arrived very late. We were too far from any large city for television signals to reach us. But in 1958, a group of locals formed a club to raise money to bring TV to Smoke Tree. By 1959, they had enough subscribers to put what was called a ‘“translator” on top of a peak in the Black Mountains. It pulled in VHF signals from distant Las Vegas, converted them to UHF and beamed them to the valley below. Suddenly, Smoke Tree residents could watch ABC, NBC, CBS, and a Las Vegas channel that mostly played old movies and had some pretty awful local shows.

  Residents became addicted. It was if the people of Smoke Tree were trying to make up for lost time. TVs in many households ran from sign-on in the morning to sign-off at midnight. Having a commercial window on the world changed the town, but in a strange way. Instead of making us feel more connected to the rest of the world, it reinforced our isolation.

  People in Smoke Tree had always had a sense of “otherness. They had long referred to driving to the coast as “going inside,” as in, “heard you went inside last week” if someone had driven to San Bernardino or Los Angeles. For all that travelers, tourists and commerce had flowed through Smoke Tree for decades, both on Highway 66 and over the Santa Fe tracks, the impact of the outside world on Smoke Tree had been very small.

  But with the availability of television, “inside” took on a more complex meaning. TV reinforced the reverse concept: our perception of ourselves as being “outside”. Residents began to understand with greater clarity how little we had in common with the people in the big cities of America. Before, life in the cities had simply seemed far away, but when the networks brought it into our homes, we saw it as something alien and different from life in Smoke Tree. It was as if the wider world was another dimension. One we could perceive but not penetrate.

  The one item people rarely missed on their televisions was the network news segment about weather across the nation. We waited anxiously for the segment pointing out the cities with the highest and lowest temperatures for the day. We watched to see if we had been the hottest place in the country, a designation that routinely rotated between Smoke Tree, Death Valley and the tiny town of Thermal in the Coachella Valley. When it had been Smoke Tree, residents felt a tiny bump of excitement because someone on television had mentioned our name.

  After jogging the streets for a few miles, I would make my way to the high school. Out on the track, I did my speed work, a series of exhausting three hundred and thirty yard sprints. After I was finished, I would circle the track at an easy pace to shake the lactic acid out of my legs before moving to the bleachers to rest for a while before running home. Sitting there alone in the darkness, I would think about leaving Smoke Tree.

  I woke up before dawn on Sunday morning at Lee’s Camp. I was well rested. It had been cool enough in the night for a thin blanket, a blessed change after a week in Smoke Tree. When I walked outside after breakfast, the thermometer by the front door read fifty eight degrees.

  I beat the sunrise to the Box S. The new room was taking shape. Joe had framed it, leaving space for a large window with a southern exposure and a bigger gap for the fireplace on the north wall. He walked over to the car.

  “Bring the stuff?”

  “Got it all.”

  I opened the trunk and pulled out the pipe I had cut and threaded. We slid the bottom pipes with the elbows attached under the foundation, then twisted the other straight pieces and elbows into place. They came up inside the form Joe had built for the hearth. We mixed a batch of cement and filled in the trenches holding the pipes.

  We got the four foot by four foot sheets of cold-rolled, weldable steel out of the back seat of my car and carried them one at a time to the barn. Inside, we laid them flat on the ground. Joe marked the metal with a piece of chalk and then lit the acetylene torch. I watched as he cut the pieces for the flue out of the metal. Then he marked some more of the metal for the flap and handle for the flue and cut those.

  He shut down the torch and got the generator running for the welder. I held the pieces in place with my gloved hands and my eyes averted while he welded the whole contraption together. The last bit of welding he did was to tack the metal hinges onto the flap and onto the box and then weld a rod and slider into place so the flue would open and close. He took off the welder’s helmet and shut down the generator.

  He picked up the chalk and wrote “Patent Pending-Joe” on his creation. We were just walking out of the barn when Kiko came outside and called us for lunch. We ate a big pan of cornbread, chunks of cheddar cheese and a four-bean salad. Throughout the meal, Kiko seemed her old self, smiling and trying to make Joe laugh.

  As we were having coffee, I asked Joe what was next.

  “Take a ride. Kiko, you come too?”

  “Always ready for a ride with my favorite guys.”

  Joe filled a desert water bag and hung it on the front of the truck. He had Kiko fill three big canteens with water from the pump in the kitchen. She asked him why we needed so much water.

  “Hot where we’re going.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Hunting obsidian.”

  Kiko left a note for John. We climbed into the truck with her in the middle. We took Kelso/Cima Road to the Union Pacific Depot, then turned south on Kelbaker Road and crossed the Union Pacific tracks. As we crossed, I looked down the long row of salt cedars that stretched along both sides of the tracks to keep the sand from the Kelso Dunes from drifting across the rails. Mediterranean trees, thriving in the middle of the Mojave.

  We climbed the blacktop road all the way to the pass through the Granite Mountains. I thought maybe we would stop there, but Joe kept going down past the Old Dad Mountains and on toward Highway 66. Now I knew why we had all the water. If there was anyplace hotter than Smoke Tree or Death Valley on a summer day, it was Bristol Dry Lake.

  When we reached 66 and turned west toward Amboy, Kiko’s posture changed. She pulled her Dodger’s cap low and slouched down the way she had when the OX cowboys had driven by on Lanfair Road.

  “Where are we going, Joe?” she asked in an anxious, tight voice.

  “Down the road a ways.”

  She did not speak again.

  We drove past both Amboy and Bagdad without stopping. A few miles west of the Cafe Bagdad and the service station, Joe pulled the truck onto the shoulder to wait for a break in the traffic. The flow was steady and we were still waiting when a highway patrol car pulled in behind us. I watched through the side view mirror as the patrolman got out and walked up to my side of the truck.

  “You folks all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Thought maybe you had car trouble.”

  “Nope. Waitin’ to cross the road.”

  “Where you headed?”

  Joe turned to face him.

  “Stedman.”

  The patrolman looked closer.

  “Joe Medrano! Didn’t realize that was you.”

  “Yep.”

  “Usually see you hitching. Never seen you drive before. Do you have a license?”

  “Yessir,” said Joe, reaching for his wallet.

  The officer held up his hand.

  “That’s okay, Joe. If you say you have one, I know you do.”

  The patrolman looked at me.

  “Well, Aeden Snow. How’s your mom and dad, Ade? Haven’t seen them in a while.”

  “Real good, Mr. Scarborough.”

  I was aware that Kiko had not looked up. I could feel the tension in her leg where it rested against mine. Her mouth was set in a thin line, and her right hand was balled into a fist. Even though the temperature in the already-hot cab had climbed even higher while we were parked under the blazing sun, Kiko looked like she was f
reezing. Her face was bloodless.

  “Well, careful crossing the highway, Joe.”

  He turned and walked back to his unit.

  Kiko kept her head down as she spoke.

  “You know that man?”

  “That’s Stan Scarborough. Lives down the street from us.”

  She bobbed her head but did not look up.

  The patrol car pulled out from behind us and merged with the westbound traffic. Kiko relaxed. She unclenched her fist and color returned to her face.

  When there was a break in the traffic, Joe drove the truck across the highway and onto a dirt road that wound off to the southwest. After a few miles, the road began to climb, and we came to a fork in the road. A crude, bullet-riddled, wooden sign lettered “Bagdad-Chase Mine” pointed off to the west. In the distance I could see the raised roadbed of the abandoned Ludlow and Southern, a railroad that had once served the mines at Stedman. Joe took the southeast fork for another two miles and then turned off onto a barely discernible track that wandered south, paralleling the low foothills of the Bullion Mountains.

  He turned off the track into a narrow wash, dropping the transmission into compound low. We crept along. The hillside on the south side of the wash was covered with lava rock, and in another half mile we came to the edge of the lava flow itself. Joe stopped the truck. We all got out.

  Joe looked behind us. He stood listening.

  Kiko, who seemed to feel better now that we had left the highway behind, started to say something, but Joe lifted a finger to his lips.

  We stood there a while longer. The great stillness settled around us. There was not even the whisper of a breeze. The heat was stifling. It must have been close to a hundred and twenty. Nothing moved. Not a bird, not a lizard, not even an insect. Sweat poured down my face. Kiko looked faint. Joe didn’t even seem to notice the heat.